Endgame with Gita Wirjawan - Jeffrey Sachs: There Is No Shortcut to Peace

Episode Date: February 7, 2024

When complexities are overlooked and shortcuts are frequently taken, the repercussions are often catastrophic. Now, who bears the brunt of such narcissism, naivete, and hubris? Renowned economist Jeffrey David Sachs guides us back to a revitalization of a long-forgotten international political culture: diplomacy. Beyond engaging in difficult conversations, diplomacy imparts the wisdom of listening, understanding, and accepting one another to enable judicious action. Sachs, serving as the Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, brings a wealth of experience. His roles as Special Advisor to UN Secretaries-General Kofi Annan (2001-7), Ban Ki-moon (2008-16), and António Guterres (2017-18) underscore his commitment to global cooperation. Furthermore, he is the author and editor of numerous influential books, including three New York Times bestsellers: "The End of Poverty" (2005), "Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet" (2008), and "The Price of Civilization" (2011). This is the second part of The Shifting World Order Series. #Endgame #GitaWirjawan #JeffreySachs ---------------------- Jeff's portrait by Narendra Bisht for Fortune India ---------------------- About the host: Gita Wirjawan is an Indonesian entrepreneur, educator, and currently a visiting scholar at The Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), Stanford University. Gita is also just appointed as an Honorary Professor of Politics and International Relations in the School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham, UK. ---------------------- Understand this Episode Better: https://sgpp.me/eps175notes ----------------------- SGPP Indonesia Master of Public Policy: [e-mail] | https://admissions.sgpp.ac.id | https://wa.me/628111522504 Other "Endgame" episode playlists: International Guests | Wandering Scientists | The Take Visit and subscribe: SGPP Indonesia | Visinema Pictures

This is stupid. Can you understand anything you people in Washington? Don't do this. You can't win. Today we're speaking with Jeffrey Sachs. He's a best-selling author. Economist and professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, Jeffrey Sachs. Ukraine is not going to join NATO. And the United States leaders need to get it through their thick skulls that they have to stop pushing this because there can't be peace. otherwise.

These wars may seem intractable, but they are not. This was all predictable. And this current situation is no good for anybody, least for Ukraine, of course, which has lost territory now that Russia didn't even claim three years ago. But because of the war, it's claiming it. It's more like the cartoon character that ran off the cliff, doesn't realize it thinks everything's fine and they're...

You can be democratic at home and ruthlessly imperial abroad. Hi, friends and fellows. Welcome to this special series of conversations involving personalities coming from a number of campuses, including Stanford University. The purpose of the series is really to unleash thought-provoking ideas that I think would be of tremendous value to you. I want to thank you for your support so far. And welcome to the special series.

Hi, we're so honored today to have Professor Jeffrey Sachs, who is the director for the Center of Sustainable Development at Columbia University. Professor Sachs, thank you so much for coming on to our show. That's great to be with you. Thank you. You know, I usually ask our guest about how they grew up. And I want to specifically ask you, you grew up in Detroit, Michigan. And talk a little bit about some of the upbringing that you went and how that has led you to succeed academically

and as to how you become what you have so far. Please, tell us. Well, thanks very much. I'm very much a product of Middle America. I grew up in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan. At the time when I was a young person, Detroit was actually a booming center of the automobile manufacturing industry.

And my father was a labor lawyer. He represented the trade unions around the auto industry and other industries of Michigan and the American Midwest. I went to public school. I'm Jewish by culture and religion. And the community that I grew up in was a Jewish. community, meaning that most of the people had migrated from Eastern Europe or Russia approximately 75 years before I was born or 50 years before I was born. So it was a community

of new arrivals to America that put a very high premium on education and on professional development, and so I was lucky to have that spirit inculcated in me. I went to public school, meaning the government provided it was local as in America rather than national. And the community provided a good education for me as a young person. And based on good results in school, I gained admission to Harvard College, went to Cambridge, Massachusetts as a 17-year-old, and ended up staying for the next 30 years, getting my bachelor's, my master's, my PhD, becoming an assistant professor, associate professor, full professor, chaired professor. So I stayed for the second phase of my life at Harvard for 30 years, raised. a family. And then I was invited by the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to become his advisor on economics and sustainable development and invited by Columbia University to lead an initiative

called the Earth Institute. So the family picked up. We moved to New York and we've been in New York now for 22 years, but most of the time I'm traveling around the world rather than being based at home. We've been a beneficiary of many of your thoughts and discussions throughout the world. In the last few decades, we've seen how the global order shift from a very much unipolar to a very much more multipolar. You've talked about this at length in many of your previous discussions. I want to seek your views on why is it ironically that in a much more multi-polar world, multilateralism seems to have dwindle. What has made it more difficult? And what do you think can be done to remedy that going forward?

We need a little bit of history, at least going back two centuries, to understand where we're, we are right now. Starting actually five centuries ago when Bosco de Gama voyaged from Europe to Asia and when Columbus voyaged westward and discovered for the Europeans this new American continent, the world changed decisively. It was the period in which the West so-called really means. meaning the countries of the North Atlantic region began their imperial pursuits. That is trans ocean conquest and trans ocean enterprise, actually. Of course, Indonesia fell to the Dutch and became Batavia, became part of the beginning. of global capitalism with the Dutch East Indies Company, and Britain began what would be an

ascent to global empire with the British East India Company founded around 1600. And this began global capitalism and European imperial domination. Of course, it was a very gradual process, nothing absolutely decisive. But things really accelerated in the 19th century with industrialization, which came first to Britain and then spread to the U.S. and the rest of Western Europe. And with industrialization, which was essentially a breakthrough of steam power and mechanization, the economic and military power of Europe was not only strong, but became utterly predominant. And so it's in the 19th century that you have the British Empire. It was sometimes called Pax Britannica, but it was the opposite of Pax, the opposite of peace.

It was war just about everywhere, wars of conquest, rebellions, crushing rebellions, crushing rebellions, the Dutch played a role, and the United States increasingly played a role. At the end of the 19th century, Japan became the first industrial power of Asia, and it joined the imperialist club right away, grabbing colonies in Taiwan and Korea, defeating first China, than Russia in war. But all of this I emphasized because by the beginning of the 20th century, it was really a Western-led world. Britain was still predominant institutionally, culturally on the Navy, on the oceans.

And the British Empire was empire number one. then came the French, the Germans, the Dutch, the Spanish and Portuguese still had some empires in the United States, and Japan were the new budding imperial powers. Two world wars essentially drew an end to the European imperial age, but greatly empowered the United States and also greatly empowered in a complex process, Russia, in the form of the Soviet Union. But what was really decisive at the end of World War II and the end of the European imperial age was that countries became independent, Indonesia, India, Indochina after prolonged war, and so on.

Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. And while every post-colonial history is very complicated, typically quite violent, lots of instability, it was the beginning of a big rebalancing of the world economy. Because what happened under the British and essentially Western imperialism was a complete predominance of Western power, literacy, and technology. And the rest of the world was essentially picking up the pieces, exploited for raw materials, very low education, very high illiteracy. And the imperial powers had no interest in doing anything about that. That was not an era of development.

It was an era of exploitation. So starting with independence, countries began the process of catching up. And they began the process of especially literacy and mass education. This is the single most important step of economic development. In 1950, the literate world was basically the Western world. Of course, I'm exaggerating, but it was incredibly concentrated in the Western world. by 2000, that had ended. Primary education was everywhere.

Literacy was extensive. The spread of technology was arriving everywhere. And there was a fundamental rebalancing of the world economic system. So it was no longer a Western system. It was increasingly a world system. Now, that is all the backdrop to geopolitics. because in 1945, what had been the British imperial system became the American imperial system. America didn't conquer territory exactly the same way.

Its mode of operation was to overthrow governments. So it put client states everywhere that it could. The U.S. engaged just between 1947 and 1989 in 70 regime change operations. according to one recent study. Sixty-four of them, by the way, covert. This was the era of the CIA formed in 1947, and the CIA essentially was, and still is to a large extent, a secret army of the president of the United States that can be deployed to overthrow governments abroad. And so the U.S. was the imperial power. It did some good things for the world. It didn't block economic development. It was a relatively open international system, except for the Soviet

part of it, but it was very much a U.S.-led system. And when the U.S. didn't like what another country was doing, it would overthrow the government, as it did in countless countries. And usually it would do so, covertly, let's say, even though everybody knew what happened. So that had a special character because the U.S. would deny the obvious. The new government would be a kind of puppet regime attacked internally for being a puppet regime of the U.S., but the U.S., no, we had nothing to do with it. It's not us. And so it really also poisoned politics in many people.

places in the world. Now, that continued, but had a marked change after 1991, because the Soviet Union, the great foe of the United States, disappeared from the map. The U.S. seemed to be the unipolar power. the U.S. actually accelerated its regime change operations just about everywhere that it could. There was more overthrow of governments, not less with the end of the Soviet Union, because the U.S. said, okay, now we can clean up everywhere. It's our world. But, of course, the rebalancing of the world economy actually accelerated, and the most important dimension of that was the rise of China. which the U.S. completely missed the point and couldn't understand what was happening, but nothing special was happening except China was making up for lost time after having been bludgeoned

for 100 years from the opium wars until independence in 1949 with the People's Republic of China. China made up for lost time and accelerated its technological. educational, institutional, infrastructural development, quite brilliantly, by the way, and became a major power. So all of that history lesson is just to say that we had after 1950 a U.S.-led world, but an underlying rebalancing of the world economy, which spread technology, know-how, literacy, education, skills all over the world. And by now, we are in an economy that is absolutely multipolar. The U.S. doesn't dominate at all economically. Technology is quite sophisticated in many places in the world, though the U.S. has still some leadership in some areas. It's

by no means what the U.S. thinks it is because China's extremely sophisticated, as are many places in the world. But the U.S. hasn't understood in foreign policy terms that that so-called unipolar world has ended because of the underlying economic rebalancing. And so we have a lot of geopolitical tension that comes from the fact that we're entering a multipolar world, but we still don't have the understanding, the kind of cultural reality between the U.S. and other countries, notably China, or the institutional reforms globally of U.S. institutions or U.S. led institutions becoming truly global institutions. So these days were really seeing a geopolitical change. That's the rise of the bricks. That's the Ukraine war. That's the war in the Middle East. This is really a set of,

you could think of them as almost like plate tectonics shifting geopolitics because of the deep underlying economic and technological shifts that are underway? That's a fascinating answer. I would make the argument that we in Southeast Asia are much more used to multipolarity. And I would make the argument that many parts of the world beyond Southeast Asia are a lot more used to multipolarity than I would argue the United States, which seems to be struggling and embracing multipolarity, right? And I want to tail this to the context of diplomacy, which you've made reference to. Diplomacy seems to be a tool that many parts of the world are not using anymore as much as we used to, right? And I want to build that in a context

of what we're witnessing in Ukraine and what we're witnessing in Gaza or West Asia. Talk about that. Well, you know, geopolitics has a lot of culture, political culture in it, statecraft culture in it. And the United States and Britain have their own distinctive political cultures that are changing themselves, of course, but should be understood. both the Britain and the U.S. were formed as evangelical Protestant societies. That means they had a self-image of evangelizing the world, saving the rest of the world. And so the British Empire, as it was exploiting the rest of the world, said it was civilizing the rest of the world. It was the white man's burden. the famous expression, to save the rest of the world. And the United States has a lot of that

Christian evangelical spirit as well. And it's a very distinctive kind of culture, because remember that British colonists, Puritans came to the east coast of the United States at a time when it was basically, of course, a continent of native Amerindian populations. This wasn't an empty place. And during the roughly 300 years period, this white Christian evangelical group ended up conquering North America in a kind of crusade or series of crusades. And in the middle of the 19th century, it was called manifest destiny, that this was a religious destiny of white people to rule over North America. And there was definitely always a strong racial component to the imperial trans-oceanic rule as well. So it wasn't just that Britain

and the United States got to the steam engine first, they really believed in a mission of, you know, civilization. Of course, the French had their own civilatrice, that we are civilizing the world. And there was a lot of grotesque pseudoscience in the late 19th century that followed Darwin, but in a pseudo-scientific way of race superiority, which turned into Nazism and its most extreme variant. But that was also part of the idea that Europe was destined to rule the world.

Now, the United States is geographically separated by two large oceans from the rest of the world. geography, global geography is not exactly the strong suit of the United States. I don't think that one in a hundred Americans could point Indonesia on the map, probably. Because we're between two very large oceans. And so when you combine several things, the U.S. is having a hard time. First, the U.S. was absolutely dominant economically at the end of World War II. It was the only place still standing, and the war had been phenomenal for the U.S. economy. The U.S. had one day of a direct war that was December 7, 1941, when Japan attacked the naval base at Pearl Harbor. Other than that, the United States was unscathed in its territory, built up incredible industry. had one scientific breakthrough after another, radar and rocketry and so many other things and semiconductors that would become the basis of the next generation of technological breakthroughs

and so forth. So first, there was the U.S. dominance. There was the geopolitical dominance. There was the evangelical spirit that, of course, the U.S. runs the world. Who else? We're out to save the world. That's a deeply believed view. Weird, but really believed. And there's a lot of ignorance because, you know, I can tell you growing up in Detroit, Michigan, I didn't learn a lot of global history or global geography. It took me a lifetime to learn what I know.

and only in part by traveling the world almost nonstop for the last 40 years, because it doesn't come naturally to someone in Middle America. So when you put all those pieces together, the U.S. has this sense. Even Biden expressed it. Of course, he's an old man decades out of tune with reality, in my opinion. But he said, we're the indispensable country. The whole world looks to us for leadership. Huh? You know, I travel the world. Does the world look to the U.S. for leadership? No. The world looks to the U.S. for, please, be normal. Stop your wars. Don't overthrow us. Cooperate. Keep your trade open. Not for your saving us. But, you know, in the American mentality, there is still this idea that the U.S. is the leader and it's going to save the world. So there's a lot of coal.

in this. By the way, there's a lot of culture everywhere in politics. If you look at Russian politics, you see a lot of Russian culture that's centuries old. If you look at Chinese statecraft, you see statecraft that was formed over 2,000 years. It's not something, this is fascinating for me, because technology changes very fast, but cultural ideas are really deeply embedded and don't change so fast and are not well understood across international boundaries. Now, you ask, therefore, about diplomacy. The U.S. is just bad at it. Diplomacy for the U.S. will tell you what to do. And even when the U.S. is so far from being able to tell anyone what to do, the mentality is still that.

And so I just think American diplomats are rude, first of all, because, you know, I've learned in 40 years something about dealing with other societies. Respect is a very key part of that. But the American approach is not respect. The American approach is, here are 10 things you need to do. Now, with a small country, that can still sometimes work, although even not so often. But with China, are you kidding? You know, to be rude to China, you think you're going to get something positive out of being rude and tough to China.

And yet, that's the American approach. So America's extremely weak at diplomacy right now. I would start with, of course, in etiquette, frankly. I would start with a course in good manners, which the U.S. really needs. I've worked with three secretaries generals of the U.N. That's a very tough job, but the first rule of that job is be polite. You've got 193 countries that you have to respond to, and everyone from the tiniest to the largest expects respect.

So this is the first thing I would try to teach American diplomats. Wow. Look, I mean, if the situations in Ukraine and Gaza are so complicated, and we're witnessing the futility of a multilateral organization called the UN. And if one looks at the budget of the UN on a yearly basis, we're looking at about $3 to $4 billion. You contrast that. Of core finance, yeah. With $8 to $900 billion that the United States is spending on defense on a yearly basis. And you put that in a much more global context where all countries around the world are spending about $2.7 trillion on defense, of which the United States, NATO, and their friends spent about $2.1 trillion. What's the prospect for diplomacy in resolving difficult situations in many parts of the world? in the future. Well, first, I wouldn't call it spending on defense.

I would call it spending on military because it's got a lot of offense in it. It's about war making. Yeah, no, no, no. And I think there's another problem, which is generals want to try out their new weapons. And when you have a large military, it's very hard anyway to just have it sit there. you know, you could do training and so on. But part of the fact, weird as it sounds, and I don't think I'm being naive, when you have a huge military outlay, you tend to use it, by the way. And the U.S. is constantly using it in theater operations, in local operations, and so on.

It's quite exaggerated and dangerous. Remember, because of this history of the U.S. Empire after World War II, the U.S. has 800 overseas military bases in about 80 countries. My God, that's a lot. Much too much. I actually think there should be an international norm and rule. rule that nobody should station their troops outside of their national borders. Wouldn't that be interesting? We couldn't have these wars. And it makes perfect sense. Your military should be for defense and it should not be for offense. You should not have networks of vast overseas bases.

By the way, the only two countries that have huge networks of bases are the United States and Britain. Britain completely as a legacy, of course, it's, you know, a small island, not very economically strong right now, but it still has military bases all over the world, essentially used by the United States, by the way. These are places where U.S. aircraft can land or get refurbished or get rearmed and so on. But I think the point is, we need a completely different multilateral approach. There's a doctrine that I really like in the UN system. Back to the UN charter, but then really amplified an international law in the 1960s,

and that is non-intervention. The idea is don't intervene in the internal affairs of other countries. You can have diplomacy with them, but don't meddle in their internal affairs. Now, if we abided by that norm, we wouldn't have these wars, actually. If the United States did not have military bases abroad, there would never be a war in Ukraine now, because the war in Ukraine emerged because the United States was trying to push NATO into Ukraine and actually into Georgia in the eastern bound. of the Black Sea as part of a strategy that goes back to Britain in 1856.

Britain already had the idea under Lord Palmerston that you should surround Russia in the Black Sea region to limit Russia's capacity to project power. And Palmerston pursued the Crimean War between 1853 and 1856 to, kick Russia, the Russian fleet out of the Black Sea. And so it was eerie to hear Zelensky talk in his New Year's address as the focus for Ukraine is to kick Russia out of the Black Sea. Zilinski, of course, is kind of just the puppet who's mouthing the words of his bosses, the United States and UK. But what he's mouthing is the words of Lord Palmerston of 170 years ago. It's unbelievable.

Still talking about we need to reduce Russia's influence in the Black Sea. Little trite. Come on. Let's grow up. And so I think that the point is we need a different approach in which the major powers back off,

stop spending hundreds of billions of dollars on armaments. Look what's happening in your region in Southeast Asia. It's becoming militarized. Everyone's supposed to choose sides. There's a new Augusta, the Australia, US, UK alliance to have nuclear-powered submarines in Australia to police the South China Sea. Are you crazy, US?

Come on. Or the quad, which is supposed to, was. surround China. This is like playing a board game. If we were playing chess or risk, okay, but this is the real world. We should grow up. We should have diplomacy. We should stop trying to corner each other. And we should back off and give space to each other so that we're not on each other's borders with trigger strategies that could lead to war. And the United States now in what surely is absolutely the stupidest imaginable idea is shipping increased armaments to Taiwan. Right.

Exactly the way that it did in Ukraine that eventually led the Russians to say, okay, we're not accepting this. We're going to clean this out. You think the Chinese are going to sit back and just watch the U.S. arm Taiwan to the teeth? it's so naive, so dangerous, so provocative, but that's the U.S. idea. Jeff, I want to take you back to what you had alluded to earlier about the U.S. politics being influenced by public opinion and special interest groups. And I'm curious as to what your views are with respect to what would unravel, what Ukraine. and I want to also make reference to some of the predictions that have been made by your good friend John Mearsheimer about Ukraine, right?

What do you think will unfold in Ukraine, given the obvious limitations of politics in the U.S. that we're witnessing? Just walk us through what could happen in the next year or two. We have to understand what the Ukraine war. is really about. The Ukraine war is really about a proxy war between the U.S. and Russia over influence in Ukraine. Look at a map. Who would you expect to have more influence in Ukraine? Russia or the United States? I'll go with Russia. First of all, it's the next door neighbor. It's the next door neighbor. Second, it actually, Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire for hundreds of years. Third, it is

linguistically, culturally, religiously, close to Russia. But the United States gets this idea, no, no, we can't let Russia have influence in Ukraine. This is a typical evangelical, imperial idea. Very British, by the way, as I said, because the British had the same idea in the 1850s. Literally, Britain and France teamed up to try to push Russia out of the Black Sea. And that was the Crimean War. And we're in the second one now. So we have this very weird idea. The United States could not leave well enough alone. it decided, well, we need to push our military into Ukraine and into Georgia. That idea came already in the early 1990s, and it was actually explained in detail by Zvignauzzynski,

the U.S. geopolitical strategist in writings in 1997. And then George W. Bush, Jr., tried to implement. implemented by announcing in 2008 that NATO would enlarge to Ukraine and to Georgia. Quickly, Russia beat up Georgia and said, don't even think about it. And in Ukraine, a cascade of crisis emerged, but most importantly, Ukraine elected a president in 2010, Viktor Yanukovych, who said, we'll be neutral. Thank you very much. stay out. But the United States couldn't stand that, so they worked to depose him. And in February

2014, worked to overthrow Yanukovych. So Russia's watching the U.S. pursue a regime change operation next door. Think of it from a U.S. perspective. If China were in Mexico City overthrowing the Mexican government so that the new government could announce that it will have Chinese military bases on the Rio Grande, the United States might be a little unhappy with that. Well, that was the situation as it unfolded in Ukraine in February 2014. Putin took back Crimea, which is where their naval bases. He wasn't claiming it beforehand. He just had a long-term lease on it.

But then when the United States moved in in February 2014 and worked to overthrow the government, Putin said, I'm not going to let Sevastopol, a naval base, fall to NATO. Are you kidding? So he took Crimea back. Then what ensued over the next eight years was lots of complication, which I won't go into detail. But essentially, the U.S. arming an anti-Russian regime that had been installed. in Kiev and building up towards war. And Putin kept saying, stop this.

You know, there were the Minsk treaties, and then there was Putin's proposal for a security arrangement with the United States at the end of 2021. And the U.S. position was, we don't negotiate with Russia. Russia's, you know, as they said, a gas station with nuclear weapons, but it's a second rate power was the U.S. attitude. Putin said, okay, we'll see. And this is where we are right now. Now, this war should never have happened. It is a war based on American stupidity, I'll say, and arrogance. The off-ramp came in 2008, in 2014, in 2021, and in April 2022, when Ukraine said, okay, we'll be neutral. and the United States said, hell no, you keep fighting. We'll keep arming you. You keep fighting. Okay, that's why we have this war going on. Ukraine is never going to join NATO, period. Because Russia's going to defeat Ukraine through conventional arms. But if for whatever reason that didn't happen, it's going to go nuclear. Ukraine is not going to join NATO.

And the United States leaders need to get it through their thick skulls that they have to stop pushing this because there can't be peace otherwise. And this current situation is no good for anybody, least for Ukraine, of course, which has lost territory now that Russia didn't even claim three years ago. But because of the war, it's claiming it. And Ukraine is losing hundreds of thousands of fighters who are dying or becoming severely wounded. The society and the economy has broken apart. This was all predictable. I called it right at the beginning. I wrote an article called the Neocons latest debacle because I said as soon as this started,

this is stupid. Can you understand anything you people in Washington? Don't do this. You can't win. Ukraine will lose. And I tried to talk to the Ukrainian authorities about this because I know a thing or two. I actually advised Ukraine's president Kuchma back in 1994. I advised Yeltsin. I know the region. They said, oh, you're just a Putin apologist. I said, I'm trying to help you. you don't understand. You're getting into a dead end, literally, this way, and I'm trying to help spare you this disaster. Well, they couldn't understand it.

They thought I was just pro-Russian propagandist, frankly. But the point is, all of this disaster was predictable. Right. And I tried to talk the White House out of this. I mean, I'm just one person, you know, an academic, but I know people. And I told them at the end of 2021, don't go to war over this, negotiate with Russia over this. Negotiate. Well, they couldn't hear that. So here we are. And I say every day Biden needs to pick up the phone and say to President Putin, you know what,

that NATO enlargement wasn't a good idea. We're not going to do that. We'll say that publicly. We'll stop this fighting. Let's work this out politically. And I keep offering, he can use my cell phone, he can use my Zoom account. Any way he wants to call, he can do it. But they don't do it yet.

But that's what they should do. Wow. Let's switch to Gaza, right? Yeah. How do you think Zionism has evolved all these years since the mid part of the 19th century? Well, not well, unfortunately, right now. Not in a way that can even survive in its current form. Right.

What happened in Israel was several steps of change of ideas. of ideas, aims, and even culture in a way. Because Zionism started as the Jews need a homeland because of discrimination and hardship in Europe, which was no doubt. And the Holocaust proved the absolute unimaginable worst of it. But it went from a homeland to a state. a state could have been manageable alongside a Palestinian state. But that didn't emerge. What emerged was Israel. The Palestinian side rejected the compromise at the beginning.

Israel won a war of independence, so-called, in 1948. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced and never were able to return to their homes. And this then proceeded in a series of conflicts in 1956, but then especially in 1967, to another war in which Israel proved its predominance over the Palestinian territories, which mean three areas, Gaza, the west bank of the Jordan River, and East Jerusalem. And these are the three areas that would constitute Palestine alongside Israel. Now, what happened after 1967 was very, very unfortunate for Israel. Of course, even more unfortunate for the Palestinian people, you could say.

But what happened for Israel was that it got itself into a disaster by creating disaster for Palestine. And that is that after the 67 war, a cultural change emerged for a variety of reasons, some secular but many religious among fervent religious Jews who said, okay, now we should dominate the whole region. We won. The religious Jews said that's God's blessing, God's backing. the hyper-religious Jews, many of them, not everything's complicated, but many of them said at the time, you know, if you go back to the Hebrew Bible, especially the sixth book of the Bible called the Book of Joshua,

it says that all of this land is promised to us. And so a religious movement started in the early 1970s that said, well, we conquered this land. land, we should never give it back. This is our land. And at the beginning, it was a fringe idea because really the origin of Zionism was a secular origin, not a religious origin. It had to do with people of a particular religion, but it was led by people who were not themselves religious. And it was a secular idea about a homeland. But starting in the 1970, it became a fervent religious movement also. This is very unusual and hard for more secular people to understand.

But what happened was some of the most religious people in Israel became the most ardent opponents of a two-state solution. And over time, they actually became the dominant political force. And this is not well understood, I would say, in Israel's major backer, which is the United States. Because the U.S. has backed Israel basically since 1948. But most people in the United States think of Israel as kind of a besieged country that is in a dangerous neighborhood and should therefore be protected. But what they don't realize is what a weird ideology based on fundamentalist religion took hold that claims as a God-given right the ability to dominate the Palestinian people. And not only dominate them, but ethnically cleanse them or kill them or do whatever Israel has to do so-called. called in order to dominate. Well, this is completely unacceptable by any rational standard.

And Israel is not acting rationally. It's acting in extreme violation of international law, with extreme brutality in the quest of a messianic idea, which is completely unacceptable, and therefore is in a creating, of course, disaster for the Palestinians, but also disaster for itself. Right. Because its politics are totally unacceptable to the rest of the world. And Israel's left with one backer, and that's the United States. And inside the United States, this backing is not very strong anymore because the young

people in the United States are shocked. They're not part of this at all. They're saying, are you kidding? We're supporting that. And they see the massacres going on and they don't like it. And so Biden is finding, to his real surprise, this isn't good politics because American politicians also thought that it was always good politics to back Israel. But it's not good politics to back zealotry and extremism that is so extreme that it's leading to massive war crimes. That's not good politics. And Biden is absolutely losing support domestically. So here we are at the start of 2024 in a complete crisis and mess. But one should understand, Netanyahu is not going to back down on his own because his whole cabinet is filled with these zealots.

This is not rational calculation. This is irrational belief in God's gift to Israel of the right to control all of this land, which is whatever they think, never going to be accepted by the rest of the world, by the Palestinian people, by the Arab and Islamic world. no way. So the way to stop this is for the United States to tell Israel, look, you can believe what you want, you can do what you want, but not with our munitions. That's all. And then Israel can't do this an extra day. Israel can't fight this war on its own military industry. This is a war fought on U.S. military industry. I want to push on this a little bit. You know, at the rate, look, what happened on October 7th,

is something we must condemn. But what's happened thereafter seems to have weakened the moral authority of Israel and the West at large, to some extent, or to a large extent. And we're witnessing some sort of a political implosion within Israel. In the context of all this,

and not to mention, you know, the political disconnect between the public and the U.S. and what, you know, the White House is doing with respect to Israel, what is the prospect of a two-state solution now, which has kind of like disappeared in the past few years going forward? Well, yeah, I think like every event, it's almost never right to think of an event,

even an event as shocking as October 7, as a standalone or as a beginning of something. By the way, even four days before October 7, Jewish religious zealots had stormed the Al-Axa mosque complex, one of the holiest sites of Islam. And so there was an immediate provocation three days before. But as in any conflict, you can go back decades. This is an unresolved political and social crisis. It never had a quiet moment.

And so it needed a political resolution October 6th or October 8th or October 7th. It's not an event that started that moment. And it's the same thing about Ukraine. Ukraine crisis did not start on October 24th, 2022 with Russia's special military operation. It goes back 30 years. And we need to understand that we're dealing with the need for political solutions to deep and ongoing wounds and that don't have a one-day explanation or a one-day start date. So this is the first point. Now, what Israel in this government, because of the history that I very

quickly summarized of deciding that it is going to dominate all of Palestine, has put itself in a situation that is completely untenable. That's all. There's no solution on the basis of the Israeli government's current beliefs. I'm a believer in the international order as vital for our survival. I don't believe that the highest politics is at the nation state. I think the highest politics is at the global community. And in this case, when you see this crisis now for 75 years and actively for 56 years since the 1967 war, and after dozens of UN resolutions in the Security Council and the General Assembly. My own view is that the Security Council, which has the authority to do it, should impose a solution. It should impose the two-state solution.

It should do it today as far as I'm concerned. I think the UN Security Council should simply immediately recognize the state of Palestine as a sovereign state UN member with the state. the borders of the 4th of June 1967, meaning Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank, the UN Security Council should mobilize

peacekeeping forces. It can be Arab. It can be U.S. It can be others to keep the two states apart from each other. But it should just impose.

this now. And there are hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers in Palestine, but they settled there after having been told for decades, that's illegal. You're in someone else's country. You can't do that as an occupying force. So that's going to have to be resolved. But they're there. But they're there. in part, not every one, but a lot of them are there because they are religious zealots who think that God gave them the right to be there. But you know what? They have no legal right to be there. And so this needs to be resolved by the international system, not by these two parties, which cannot do it on their own. Well, Jeff, I got to end it. I got to end it. this discussion with an economic question, opposed to an economist.

We've seen many parts of the world or the global economy running on the wheels of massive quantitative easing. Is this something that you believe is sustainable? Or do you believe that there's this new economic philosophy or statecraft that would be more feasible for the world over? going forward. Well, I think the first point is the monetary system is not the real economy. The monetary system is there to facilitate transactions in the real economy. You can't make an economy rich by printing money, period. This is the first thing we study and learn and teach in economics. So there are short-term debates about higher or lower interest rates, but focus on the real economy. Second, the real economy in the 21st century depends utterly on skills.

So if any country wants to be successful, the single most important thing to do by far is educate your children, period. It's the number one, two, three, four, and five priority. Your children should be highly literate, numerate. They should be aware of the world. They should understand digital technologies. They should know the world that they are going to be working in, and many of them are going to be helping to guide and to lead. So education, by far the most important single investment

that any society makes. Third point, given our technologies, solutions and industry get built at a regional scale. Even a country with the population, the size of Indonesia, doesn't go it alone. ASEAN is really important for Indonesia. Indonesia is really important for ASEAN. But even ASEAN is not big enough. Definitely good, close relations. with China, for example.

Economically, absolutely essential. Build infrastructure, connect with rail, with fiber, with the zero-carbon power systems. The region that I really like is the so-called ARSEP region, the regional comprehensive economic partnership, which has 10 ASEAN countries, three Northeast Asian countries, China, Japan, and Korea. and two oceanic countries, Australia and New Zealand. Now, that group, that's a terrific group, very diverse, very successful. If the RSEP region got together and said, you know, we're going to clean up our economies, we're going to interconnect with zero-carbon energy, we're going to interconnect with the

interconnect with the advanced 5G or 6G technology, this would be the most dynamic region of the world economy. Instead, the United States is saying, oh, no, no, no, don't deal with China. You need to divide. You need to keep separate. We need a military alliance. Tell the United States, go home, chill out. Let us do our own thing. And then you'd have this incredible dynamism in East Asia. And there's no reason. why China, Japan, and Korea, for example, can't get along. And Japan's hostility to China is completely misplaced. You know, in 2,000 years of being neighbors, China never invaded Japan, even once, except with the footnote, that when the Mongols were ruling China, in 1274 and 1281.

They tried twice. The kamikaze wins defeated them. But China never invaded Japan. So Japan should realize it's not your enemy. Just cooperate. And this would change the dynamics. And the United States, which knows the least of everything, should be told, go home, chill out. We're just fine. We don't want an arms race. We don't want a war over Taiwan. We don't need all your military bases here. We don't want conflict. And then you'd really have prosperity in the East Asian region. That's very hopeful. Jeff, I know you've got to go. You've been so kind with your time, and I want to thank you so much. Well, happy New Year to you and great to be with you.

Thank you so much. Thank you so much. That was Professor Jeffrey Sachs from Columbia University. Endgame.